PHOTO/ULTRAVIOLET
“Free me. Free my children. We came looking for refuge and we’re being treated like criminals.” With this cry, 78 mothers staged a hunger and work strike at the Karnes Detention Center in Karnes, Texas (a private, for-profit ICE detention center run by GEO Group Inc.) Their children’s health is deteriorating. They can’t eat the food. The water is heavily chlorinated due to the thousands of “fracked” oil and gas wells in the area. Yet they cannot afford to buy food and water in the prison commissary. One bottle of water is $3, their daily pay. Some are sexually abused by guards. Some are put in isolation rooms along with their children because of their protests.
Fleeing U.S. State sponsored poverty and gang violence in their home countries of El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras, where “femicide” (the murder of women) and homicide rates are among the highest in the world, they’ve been held without bond for up to ten months. Having already established “credible fear” of persecution or torture in their countries of origin, why are these women and children imprisoned here in the “Land of the Free?”
Immigration in the past period of economic expansion served the growing labor needs of industry. In an economy increasingly based on electronic and laborless production, large numbers of workers are no longer needed to fuel capitalist industry.
Today 2.4 billion workers globally are considered “vulnerably employed,” unemployed or inactive in a workforce of 3.1 billion, outnumbering those actually working for wages. A growing section of this “global reserve army of labor” is a mass of near or permanently unemployed workers. Capitalism will not care for workers it can no longer exploit.
The immigrant mothers and children, along with a growing section of workers in this country, are being catapulted into a desperate struggle for survival. They are fighting for their basic human right to exist and live free of police terror in a dying capitalist system. Our struggle and theirs are one and the same.
We must not allow our ranks to be divided. Defending the human rights of the most vulnerable workers, which include the undocumented immigrants, and uniting around our common economic needs for survival, are the first steps in creating a cooperative world free from exploitation and securing the necessities of life for us all. Free the mothers and children! Shut down the detention centers.
… and all this during a time or record stock market highs.
“First they came for the Socialists, and I did not speak out—
Because I was not a Socialist.
Then they came for the Trade Unionists, and I did not speak out— Because I was not a Trade Unionist.
Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out—
Because I was not a Jew.
Then they came for me—and there was no one left to speak for me. ” – Martin Niemöller
… we need to stop allowing the greedy rich people of the world to separate us based on race, sex, creed, and religion. there is plenty of everything we need to survive on the earth in abundance – but yet 15,000 people starve to death every single day.
… these greedy people make the 15,000 who starve to death daily the problem, instead of acknowledging that they, are in fact, the problem.
… maybe it’s time to throw the 85 people who own half of the world’s resources into the detention centers, and let the poor people trying to survive go free?